The Dark Net (12 page)

Shortly after the Snowden revelations, a group of privacy activists held a very large crypto-party on the campus of Goldsmiths, University of London. I joined around two hundred people, all of whom wanted to learn how to stay anonymous online. In packed workshop sessions, each one hour long, we learned how to use Tor to browse anonymously; how to spend Bitcoins; how to use PGP. There was an interesting mix of participants. A group of older women were delighted at sending messages to each other using PGP
(which is weirdly satisfying). Soon we were exchanging missives. With only a click, this:

Jklr90ifjkdfndsxmcnvjcxkjvoisdfuewlkffdsshSklr9jkfmdsgk,nm3inj

219fnnokmf9n0ifjkdfndsxmcnvjcxkjvoisdfuewlkfJflgmfklr90ifjkdfn

dsxmcnvjcxkjvoisdfuewlkf,nm3inj219fnnokmf972nfksjhf83kdbgfh

ydid89qhdkfksdfhs8g93kkkafndhfgusdug892kmgsndu19jgwdnng

skgds8t48senglsdpss9sy31bajsakf7qianfkalhs19jaslfauwq8qoafall

2kjhagfasjf993hamfalsfuqiejfkallnjksd732j1ls0dskj

suddenly becomes:

Hello!

I met a journalist worried about his sources in a dangerous part of the world overseas, and a few students who seemed happy to have found a cause to rage against. One German woman told me that she was old enough to remember the Stasi, and is convinced that we are sleepwalking into some kind of Orwellian dystopia. ‘Do
you
trust the police?’ She glares at me. Well, yes, most of the time, I reply. ‘Well, you shouldn’t!’ she snapped. I asked her if she’d ever heard of Tim May and the cypherpunks. She hadn’t. In fact, no one had. But so what? Surveys consistently show that we value privacy; nine out of ten Britons say they would like more control over what happens to their personal data online. The balance societies endeavour to find between individual freedoms and state power is always in flux. Most of us accept that, even in democracies, we need to be spied on sometimes – but that it should be limited,
proportionate and not misused. We pass laws to try to ensure that’s the case: but modern technology has moved on so quickly, and with the advent of extremely powerful computing and the fact we share so much publicly about ourselves, a lot of people – not just cypherpunks – think that their right to privacy is being breached.

People like Phil Zimmermann or Smári are developing crypto because they believe their work helps guard civil liberties from intrusive surveillance, especially in repressive regimes. And undoubtedly it does. But it’s not only freedom fighters and democratic revolutionaries that use their tools. Terrorists, extremists, serious organised criminals and child pornographers, denied mainstream channels, are often early adopters of new technology and also have an incentive to stay secret and hidden. The major producers and distributors – although not viewers – of child pornography are expert users of crypto. Without Bitcoin, the online drugs market Silk Road would probably never have existed.

David Omand, the former GCHQ Director who is now a visiting professor at King’s College London, remains close to the intelligence agencies in the UK. ‘It is absolutely vital that intelligence agencies retain the capability to monitor who they need, in order to keep the public safe,’ he tells me. ‘The internet gives a much wider range of options for avoiding surveillance. It is generally true that terrorists and serious criminals will and do use the latest technology available to them, and follow very closely the latest
development in secure communications. It’s an arms race.’ It has been alleged – although never proven – that the 9/11 terrorists used PGP encryption in their communications: ‘I have no idea whatsoever about that,’ says Omand. But he is convinced that terrorists would have been ‘delighted’ by information about the Edward Snowden leaks. ‘You can be sure that they were following the story very closely indeed: as would have been the Russian and Chinese governments.’

I asked him if he was worried about the rise in crypto-parties, or more widespread adoption of Tor, Mailpile and Dark Wallets. Might it make us less safe? ‘Yes, it does concern me. But you won’t stop the intelligence machine.’ He thinks intelligence officers will find a way around it – they have to – but it might end up being more intrusive than using the alleged methods exposed by Edward Snowden. He recounts that during the Cold War, Soviet cyphers were too strong for GCHQ to break, so British intelligence switched to recruiting more Soviet agents. If the state considers you to be a legitimate target for security investigation but can’t track your online activity using an anonymous browser, they’ll put a bug in your bedroom instead. He predicts more agents and intrusive operations in future, ‘which is typically more morally hazardous’.

For the cypherpunks, the fact that criminals use encryption is an unfortunate outcome, but a cost worth paying for the extra freedom it provides. Zimmermann has been asked repeatedly how he feels that the 9/11 hijackers might have used software he designed. It was, he says, far outweighed by the fact PGP is ‘a tool for human rights around the world . . . strong crypto does more good for a democratic society than harm.’ Zimmermann or Tim May don’t
have responsibility for keeping the public safe, and don’t read top-secret security briefings. Omand did. Not that he blames Zimmermann – ‘it is not a moral consideration for him to weigh up. Of course he should have developed PGP. We would not have the benefits of the internet without such breakthroughs. But it’s for elected, democratic governments to decide whether new technologies also pose dangers for the public and what if anything needs to be done to keep down those risks to acceptable levels.’

In the early days, crypto was a libertarian dream – a way to spark a revolution. The cypherpunks were hard-nosed Ayn Rand libertarians, mainly concerned about individual liberty. Today, the issue of privacy and anonymity online has become a major preoccupation for people across the political spectrum. ‘Politically, the cypherpunks are all over the place now,’ says May, a little mournfully.

The majority of cypherpunks working on ways to evade state detection are not free-market warriors or convinced Randians like Tim May. Smári is a thoughtful anarchist, someone who supports the abolition of the state like May, but believes that humans, when left alone by powerful interests, will tend to cooperate and create flourishing societies, not isolated retreats. And unlike May, people like Smári worry about welfare, minority rights and other progressive causes. But they all share a distrust of governments and centres of power – especially the security establishment – and see crypto as a mathematically guaranteed way of rebalancing democracy towards
ordinary folk. Enric Duran, an avowed anti-capitalist, sees Bitcoin much like Tim May does – ‘an important gambit in the path which heads towards our final objective of integrated cooperatives’, he tells me, via email. A world free of nation states. Crypto-currencies can ‘help stop our dependence on the Euro – and reduce the state’s ability to control us’.

Although representing radically different world views, they all believe that anonymity and privacy are vital to healthy, functioning, free society. For the cypherpunks, whether anarchist or libertarian, anonymity is about preserving the ability of people to hold multiple personalities and identities. By providing that, crypto extends the degrees of freedom individuals have, which in the long run will encourage people to live more productive and self-reliant lives, and leave more space for new ways of living. That’s how Amir sees it. ‘This is about trying to carve out a space of freedom,’ he explained, ‘so people can do things that are worthwhile. Far better to build trust networks that are based on establishing a relationship rather than judges, bureaucracy, the police.’ Amir is full of ideas. Next year he plans to build industrial machines that can be used to create sustainable agriculture, waste management systems: ‘We’re going to have our own industrial economy,’ he says. He thinks he’ll be able to build a house for 1,000 euros and sell it for five times that, which he’d reinvest in making another Calafou somewhere else: ‘If they want us to play their stupid economic game, we’ll beat them at it – and buy the world back.’

But if everyone starts using Bitcoin, government’s ability to tax and spend will diminish: healthcare, education and social security will suffer. The things that hold democracies together, and provide
support for the most in need. Societies cannot be broken and fixed like computer code, nor do they follow predictable mathematical rules. If genuinely anonymous communication becomes the norm, it’s inevitable that it will be used by criminals too. Some of the progressive groups and individuals that are fighting for digital anonymity are doing it for good reason. They don’t realise they are also pushing the political agenda of a hard-line, radical libertarian from California.

Tim May doesn’t care what’s propelling it, because he thinks the endgame is inevitable. He tells me the third leg of the trifecta is in place: along with PGP, and anonymous browsing, there is now an anonymous currency: ‘And, man,’ he exclaims excitedly, ‘that’s
got
to be freaking Big Brother out!’ May anticipates that in the coming decades, governments as we know them will disintegrate – to be replaced by a digital ‘Gulch’, something he calls a ‘cyberstead’. A place where citizens can exist with no state at all, creating online communities of interest and interacting directly with each other. Like Amir, he’s under no illusions that in the short term it will be turbulent for those at the bottom, even if the long-term prospects are good. ‘Crypto-anarchy means prosperity for those who can grab it, those competent enough to have something of value to offer for sale,’ he wrote in 1994. He hasn’t lost his radical edge: ‘We’re about to see the burn-off of useless eaters,’ he tells me, only half joking. ‘Approximately four to five billion people on our planet are essentially doomed: crypto is about making the world safe for the 1 per cent.’ The short term has to be tough, he believes. It’s only by removing the crutches we depend on to protect us – rules, laws, welfare – that we can grow to fulfil our potential.

I left Calafou admiring what Amir and others are attempting but worried about what it might lead to. Amir is different from May in many ways. He believes places like Calafou offer a better alternative to other ways of living, for everyone – not just for the top 5, or even 1, per cent – which is why it will win out in the end. But like May, he believes crypto will make this happen, without thinking precisely how, or what the consequences could be. A mathematical formula that will, with the relentless certainty of numbers, create a world of Calafous: small collectives that are self-sustaining, self-governing, owned and controlled by the people.

At Calafou there are ‘people’s assemblies’, where the residents meet to agree common tasks, projects, responsibilities and so on. It’s a sort of Greek agora: a method of collective decision-making that tries to involve everyone in this nascent little community. ‘Us in the hacker space don’t bother with it,’ says Amir. ‘We don’t believe in it. We want to promote individual freedom. If you have an idea, just get on and do it.’ As I was leaving Calafou, crossing back over the concrete bridge to the outside world, Amir told me: ‘There are so many people just complaining and doing nothing about it. We actually
make
things. We solve problems.’ Cypherpunks write code. And he wandered back into his very own Gulch.

^fn1
Despite their heated exchanges, the two would later become friends.

^fn2
Someone told me later he sometimes works forty-eight hours straight, before sleeping for a day to recover. It turns out, when Pablo finally does talk, that he’d been in the middle of receiving the first successful Bitcoin transaction using a ‘stealth address’, one that cannot be traced.

^fn3
Bitcoins can be divided into eight decimal places. The smallest non-divisible unit is known as a ‘Satoshi’.

^fn4
I’ve documented at least 350 publicly announced crypto-parties around the world since 2012, on every continent, with anything from 5 to 500 people taking part.

TOR HIDDEN SERVICES
are not easy to navigate. In many respects, they are very similar to websites on the surface net. But they are rarely linked to other sites, and the URL addresses are a meaningless series of numbers and letters: h67ugho8yhgff941.onion rather than the more familiar .com or .co.uk. To make matters worse, Tor Hidden Services frequently change addresses. To help visitors, there are several ‘index’ pages that list current addresses. In 2013, the most well known of these index pages was called the Hidden Wiki. The Hidden Wiki looks identical to Wikipedia, and lists dozens of the most popular sites in this strange parallel internet: the WikiLeaks cache, censorship-free blogs, hacker chat forums, the
New Yorker
magazine’s whistleblower drop box.

In late 2013 I was browsing the Hidden Wiki, searching for the infamous dark net market Silk Road. As I scrolled down, I suddenly spotted a link for a child pornography website. I stopped. There was nothing strikingly different about it – a simple link to an address comprised of a string of numbers and letters, like every other website
listed here. For a while I sat frozen, unsure what to do. Close down my computer? Take a screenshot? I contacted the police.

The internet has radically changed the way child pornography is produced, shared and viewed. According to the United Nations, child pornography (which some specialists prefer to call child abuse images) refers to ‘any representation, by whatever means, of a child engaged in real or simulated explicit sexual activities or any representation of the sexual parts of a child for primarily sexual purposes’. According to UK law, these images are classified under five levels of obscenity.

Once I’d opened my Tor browser, it took me two mouse clicks to arrive at the page advertising the link. If I had clicked again, I would have committed an extremely serious crime. I can’t think of another instance where doing something so bad is so easy.

We can now share files and information more simply, quickly and inexpensively than ever before. On the whole, that is a very positive thing. But not always. Is child pornography really this accessible? What does it mean if it is? Who is creating and viewing it? And in an age of anonymity, is it possible to stop them?